Chip testing company OptimalTest has closed a financing round of $7.5 million. Aviv Venture Capital joined the financing round alongside previous investors Pitango Venture Capital, Carmel Ventures, and Evergreen Venture Partners. The company has raised $39 million to date.
OptimalTest was founded in 2004 by CEO Dan Glotter, and COO Nir Erez and currently has nearly 70 employees.
OptimalTest is striving to cope with one of the major problems confronting the development of processors. Today most of the world's chip providers have operating models that do not include their own fabless plants. The largest companies in this niche market are Qualcomm, Broadcom and AMD in a market worth $65 billion in 2011 represent 20% of the entire chip market. The cost of setting up an advanced PCB production line is between $2 billion and $6 billion. For these companies, the logistics of manufacturing through outsourcing, usually in the Far East, include command and control of complex procedures between various suppliers, shipping, sales, and the production itself. The production process is completely outside of their control and managed by external suppliers, and thus the companies designing chips have little information about the success of the process that undergoes production installation, testing, packaging and transportation. In some instances each of these stages is managed by a different supplier.
OptimalTest attempts to simplify the process by providing software that allows the assembly development companies to receive, "the latest picture of every chip that moves at them," says Glotter. "We've become a company that every fabless company loves."
OptimalTest claims to have a 90% presence along the supply chain of fabless companies.
Customers include Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia. OptimalTest had revenue of $11 million in 2011 and expects to end 2012 with Revenue of $20 million and profitability.
Haim Shani, the former NICE Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: NICE; TASE: NICE) CEO and Finance Ministry director general has rejoined OptimalTest's board of directors. He resigned from the board when he became head of the Finance Ministry.